Village of Creekside Park

IDS Engineering Group provided improvements in The Woodlands’ Village of Creekside Park, a new 4,000-acre development in Harris County. IDS developed the overall master plan for the development, and completed the design and obtained agency approvals for three water plants, the regional wastewater treatment plant, four lift stations, miles of major thoroughfare roadways, collector streets, trunk sanitary sewer lines, waterlines, force mains, including 75 residential subdivision sections totaling 3,500 lots. As a part of the development, IDS designed approximately 15,000 LF of drainage channel, 150 acres of amenity/stormwater quality basins with various control gates and weir structures, and a regional detention facility with a footprint of more than 200 acres consisting of approximately 2,000 acre-feet of excavation.

Drainage Channel A serves the eastern portion of the development and discharges into Spring Creek. The traditional outfall of a man-made channel into a large, natural, heavily vegetated waterway such as Spring Creek typically includes clearing and grubbing to the creek flow line and costly drop structures and erosion controls to reach the flow line of the creek. Given IDS’s experience with the sandy soils and groundwater in the area, we knew stabilizing this traditional outfall, if possible, would be very difficult and costly. As an alternative to the traditional methods, IDS designed an outfall that terminated at the high bank of Spring Creek. The outfall included a wide and shallow stilling basin to slow and thin the stormwater flow profile. The flows then day-lighted and traveled down the heavily vegetated slope of Spring Creek much like it always had. Drainage Channel A was completed in 2005 and no maintenance has been required downstream of the outfall to date. The natural vegetation has provided ideal erosion control at zero cost.

Lake Paloma is a 90-acre amenity, conveyance, stormwater quality basin that serves approximately 700 acres of the development. Lake Paloma’s mulit-level impoundment consisted of approximately 600 acre-feet of excavation, three control weirs with gravity bypass conduits and gates to allow draining for maintenance. The third weir passes approximately 1,502 cubic feet per second and utilizes the outfall design that has been so successful at Drainage Channel A.